Learning to cope with stress and to use it to our advantage.

Learning to cope with stress and to use it to our advantage is one of the great challenges of modern times. How then do we know when we may be about to suffer from stress? What are the symptoms?

Stress doesn’t seem to happen all at once. It creeps up on us, but there is a recognised pattern of behaviour.

Firstly we always seem to be tired and have difficulty in getting to sleep.
Our concentration and short term memory start to fail. We may have difficulty in carrying out a long conversation.
All that is important is what concerns the relevance to the stress. We become more introverted
Following on from the above bullet point we start to ignore family and friends. They become obstructions rather than pleasures. We also take less interest in our appearance.
We start to repeat some of our actions. We may check every hour or so that the gas is turned off, that the lights are off, that the tap isn’t dripping.
We get irritable quickly and it doesn’t take much to “set us off”
We may eventually try to take refuge in drugs or alcohol. Often this is to help to get some sleep.

We now know the symptoms, but what are the causes of stress?

The most severe forms of stress are caused by problems that we have little or no control over – work/school/home relationships, moving house, death in the family, lack of money. These will, at some time, be a time when circumstances cause some stress. How healthy we are can be a factor in how we cope with it.

Stress can also increase risk from stroke, heart disease, as well as raise blood pressure, weaken the immune system, making it more difficult to fight infection, cause ulcers and more…

If you see yourself in most of the above try not to get caught up in it. Think that now is the time to relax.